29 de dezembro de 2013

Last month I published a post on my company blog that caused some (shall we say) interesting feedback from both our publisher clients as well as the broader media community. While I was certainly not the first to proclaim the death of the tablet magazine, the now universally recognized and unequivocal data pointing to the steep decline of print-replica apps is becoming undeniable.What’s even worse news for magazine publishers who have chosen either a PDF-based or Adobe InDesign-led “Plug-In” app solution in a race to cash in on Apple’s Newsstand is the damning evidence of Apple’s lack of support…and frankly, interest in the Newsstand app itself.

Smashwords today unveiled our first major website redesign since our launch in 2008.We made hundreds of changes large and small. We also made technical changes behind the scenes that will lay the groundwork for us to introduce many new tools and features for authors and readers alike in 2014.

Nintendo hashonto nintendo 3ds been promising to launch an ebookstore for the Nintendo 3DS for over a year now and it has finally arrived – in Japan.It’s called honto for Nintendo 3DS, and the service includes both a reading app as well as an ebookstore. The current selection is limited to only around 200 titles, but Nintendo hopes to increase their catalog to over 1,000 in 2014.

This is what I’ve learned, having now self-published three books (selling close to 10,000 copies total)—two using Gumroad and Sellfy (which are indie sales platforms, aka: digital goods e-commerce services, or “indies” from here on in), and my latest on Amazon’s KDP Select platform. My first two books were sold as PDFs and promoted exclusively on my own website. While they were added to Amazon (using BookBaby), I put zero effort into promoting them there. The thought was that I may as well get 95 percent of the sale (minus transaction fees) through indies, since Amazon was only paying out around 70 percent to authors. The main reason I used KDP for the third book is because I hadn’t used it before, and have a penchant for experimenting (which is actually a topic from the latest book). I talk/write a lot about self-publishing so I wanted to make sure I understood every major angle.

Tell people you’re reading a book, and they’ll probably picture papers sewn together into a binding. Tell people you’re reading an ebook, and it’s not such a cut-and-dry mental picture.There are dozens of ways to make an ebook, but one format is emerging as the international standard: the EPUB. One day soon, the EPUB format may be the first ebook picture that comes to mind.

Seeing as though 2013 is just about over, we’ve gathered more publishing experts to predict what extraordinary events are to come in book publishing in 2014. This year, we had so many insightful predictions to choose from – it was hard to pick just these ten. Stay tuned in the coming days for more predictions, those that hit the cutting-room floor.

Calibre, the leading ebook management/reading/library/conversion app, is now also an ebook editor. This new feature was added in a weekly update about 2 weeks ago, but it only came to my attention this week.

The ruling this week comes as a result of a lawsuit filed in February 2013 by a Holmes enthusiast. Finding the publication of his latest anthology of Holmes stories blocked by the Conan Doyle estate, noted Sherlockian scholar, Baker Street Irregular, and prominent attorney Leslie Klinger filed suit in the federal district court of Illinois to settle once and for all whether the character Sherlock Holmes was under copyright or in the public domain.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the January 5, 2014 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending December 21, 2013.

15 de dezembro de 2013

Lately, two recent trends are taking place in e-book publishing. First, several articles in the past few months indicate that e-book returns have grown among readers. Some readers are abusing Amazon’s generous Kindle book return policy in order to get their money back after purchasing a book.While it’s important for Amazon and other online retailers to have a mechanism in place to allow readers to return books — due to publishing errors or technical problems — the idea of reading a book then returning it is a big problem. It hampers self-published author sales and minimizes the purpose of a return policy.

Talking to authors—and especially authors who have already been published by big traditional publishers—you can see the excitement and anticipation when this subject comes up.The chance to publish what you want, when you want to, in the way you think best. The return of power and influence to the actual creators of the content. That’s exciting.

The Fina screen module, which is being used in the recently announced Pocketbook CAD Reader, features a lighter and thinner glass backplane.This screen replaces the glass TFT backplane used in many E-ink screens with a very thin glass substrate that promises to deliver screens that are much lighter and thinner than in standard LCD screens. It is now available to be built into E-ink screens of all sizes from 5″, to the 13.3″ screen used in the Pocketbook CAD Reader. According to the press release, a Fina screen weighs less than half as much as an E-ink screen which uses an existing backplane, and it is less than half as thick.

As part of a worldwide 4-year project, the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford in the U.K. and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in the Vatican City have launched some of their collections digitally available online at http://bav.bodielan.ox.ac.uk

As many as a quarter of the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com are from indie publishers, according to data revealed at a trade presentation by the retailer.A chart detailing the 25 top-selling indie titles in 2012 was passed on by an audience member via Twitter. Though the term indie is broad, covering everything from self-published authors to publishing houses that fall outside the big six, the news has been interpreted as a victory for the go-it-alone author. However in the US the term has come to mean self-published. A spokeswoman for Amazon.com said: "This figure is referring to Kindle books on Amazon.com in 2012, with 'indie' meaning books self-published via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). So a quarter of the top 100 bestselling Kindle books on Amazon.com in 2012 were self-published via KDP."

Amazon Publishing has launched a new digital short story imprint in the US called StoryFront.The imprint will also be home to Amazon’s digital literary journal Day One, a weekly publication dedicated to short fiction and poetry from emerging writers.

The National Library of Norway is planning to digitize all the books by the mid 2020s.Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every book in the library's holdings.By law, "all published content, in all media, [must] be deposited with the National Library of Norway," so when the library is finished scanning, the entire record of a people's language and literature will be machine-readable and sitting in whatever we call the cloud in 15 years.

Launched in partnership with comiXology, the new marketplace lets you browse a diverse selection of over 40,000 top comics and graphic novels. After you’ve decided on a purchase, you’ll be directed to comiXology to complete the transaction.

All book-lovers know the digital revolution is having an impact on independent bookstores. Except for Barnes & Noble, the chains are gone. Fewer and fewer independent bookstores have survived the onslaught of online retailing. I thought it would be illuminating to talk with Annie Philbrick, co-owner of the Bank Square Bookstore, an independent business located in Mystic Connecticut.Despite enormous competition from online retailers, and though the store was closed for weeks in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the Bank Square Book Store has remained a vital resource for book lovers in the community. Annie provides insight about her strategies for surviving, and, in fact, thriving, and talks about the state of retail book-selling today.

For years, Open Access has been seen as a way to remove barriers to research in developing countries. In order to test this, an experiment was conducted to measure whether publishing academic books in Open Access has a positive effect on developing countries. During a period of nine months the usage data of 180 books was recorded. Of those, a set of 43 titles was used as control group with restricted access. The rest was made fully accessible.The data shows the digital divide between developing countries and developed countries: 70 percent of the discovery data and 73 percent of online usage data come from developed countries. Using statistical analysis, the experiment confirms that Open Access publishing enhances discovery and online usage in developing countries. This strengthens the claims of the advocates of Open Access: researchers from the developing countries do benefit from free academic books.

“It’s no surprise that e-books haven’t become so popular in Japan,” said Toru Sanpei, chief of the secretariat of the Japan Electronic Publishing Association.“Japan is much smaller than the U.S. in terms of land area, but there are so many bookstores, and people can buy cheap but well-made books. So books don’t really have to be digital,” Sanpei said.

Cambridge University Press (CUP), the oldest publisher in the world, is overhauling its enterprise applications in a bid to keep up with how people consume content in the digital world.Established in 1534 by Henry VIII, CUP has more than 50,000 titles in its back catalogue and produces more than 2,500 titles a year. However, like many other publishers, it is having to reassess its business model to accommodate a shift from pure print to a combined print and digital future.

Amazon is now preparing a new Kindle Paperwhite for release in early Q2 of next year, TechCrunch has learned. The marquee feature of the new device is a high-resolution 300 ppi screen that will bring the company's e-reader displays back into technical parity with devices from competitors like Kobo.

Barnes & Noblebarnes noble logo shared more bad news today in the form of a new quarterly report. In the 3 months ending 26 October, B&N grossed a total revenue of $1.73 billion, or about 8% less than the same period last year.On the plus side, B&N reported that EBITA (operating profit) increased from $66.5 million to $75.7 million. They also reported net earnings of $13.2 million, or 15 cents a share, up from $501,000 a year ago. On a per-share basis, the company posted a loss of seven cents a year earlier.

Sixteen to 24-year-olds are known as the super-connected generation, obsessed with snapping selfies or downloading the latest mobile apps, so it comes as a surprise to learn that 62% prefer print books to ebooks.

Asked about preferences for physical products versus digital content, printed books jump out as the media most desired in material form, ahead of movies (48%), newspapers and magazines (47%), CDs (32%), and video games (31%).

Hmmph. I could buy the books from England, of course, but (a) it's expensive, and (b) I don't want three more dead-tree books in my library. I want to read them on my tablet. But I can't do that either, because publishers these days are all hellbent on using digital technology to maintain more control over their products than they ever had in the physical world. I can buy the physical books and have them shipped to Irvine, but I can't buy the Kindle version and download it to my American tablet. For contractual reasons, Tor UK does not permit that, and the region coding embedded in the Kindle app enforces their desire. So I'm screwed.

Worldreader has a lofty goal: eradicating global illiteracy. So far they've reached 13,000 kids in Sub-Saharan Africa by giving them e-readers loaded with local and international books. John Risher of Worldreader joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss their mission and how learning to read can improve children's lives.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the December 8, 2013 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending November 23, 2013.